"I want to see how other teachers do it. I've got to believe in it before I can teach it."
Literacy Hub Persona 3: Teacher Mandy
Age: 32.
Work: Year 1 teacher.
Family: Married with a 6 year old boy and a 3 year old girl.
Location: Suburban.
Personality
Mandy has taught for 7 years and specialises in Early Years education. Her own children also sit in the early year's age group and her 6-year-old boy has attention deficit disorder, which has sharpened her curiosity about reading acquisition using a Multisensory Structured Language approach.
Mandy is finding her way when it comes to assessing phonics frameworks to use in class or at home. While it's easier for teachers if a school is prescriptive, Mandy knows that "one size does not fit all" for students. She is especially concerned about struggling readers who are discouraged by test results and disengage at a young age.
Mandy spends a lot of time sifting through resources, making her own, and patching together lesson materials from a range of sources.
Her goal is to identify the core principles, strategies and stimuli, which all good phonics programs share; and gain confidence in their practice. She regards other teachers as the most credible source of knowledge and uses social networking platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube to observe new strategies in action.
Goals
- To learn more about phonics from other teachers.
- To gain confidence in applying new strategies in class.
- To know how to differentiate for students with different needs.
- To find high-quality resources quickly.
- The way teachers are 'swamped' by an endless stream of new programs, in literacy and in all other subjects.
- The time it takes to sift through these programs.
- The time it takes to find and make in-class resources.
- Students who disengage because they find traditional methods and assessment models so discouraging.
- Identify the 'core' principles, that are shared by competing phonics programs.
- Show me how it's done! Provide videos, blogs, forums, or links, to demonstrate the strategies used by star teachers.
- Provide a library of succinct lesson ideas, with accompanying resources.
- Show me how to differentiate for a range of students.
- Create a "shoe size chart", to show how the varying phonics frameworks map to one another.
- Do the sifting for me.